"Computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing has been given a posthumous royal pardon.It addresses his 1952 conviction for homosexuality for which he was punished by being chemically castrated.The conviction meant he lost his security clearance and had to stop the code-cracking work that had proved vital to the Allies in World War Two.The pardon was granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a request by Justice Minister Chris Grayling."

Alan Turing gets royal pardon for 'gross indecency' – 61 years after he poisoned himself.He was the father of modern computing whose work on the Enigma code at Bletchley Park is said to have shortened the Second World War.

Alan Turing, the wartime codebreaker, has been granted a posthumous pardon by the Queen for his criminal conviction for homosexuality.

Dr Turing, who helped Britain to win World War II, killed himself after receiving the conviction in 1952.He has now been granted a pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy after a high-profile campaign supported by tens of thousands of people including Professor Stephen Hawking.

Six decades after his chemical castration and later suicide, Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science and breaker of the Nazis’ Enigma code, is being pardoned on Tuesday for his conviction for homosexuality.Turing – whose code-breaking work is said to have shortened the second world war by two years – has been granted a posthumous pardon under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy by the Queen, following a U-turn by the UK government.

Hailed as a genius in his own time by colleagues at Bletchley Park, the UK’s wartime code-breaking centre, he was later prosecuted for “homosexual activities” after he reported a burglary at his home in Manchester.After police discovered that he was gay, they arrested him under Victorian-era laws against homosexuality. An estimated 49,000 gay men, now dead, were criminalised under the now-defunct Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885.

Everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine,” Time Magazine wrote in 1999, after naming Turing one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

......wartime codebreaker Alan Turing ... was convicted in the 1950s for homosexual activity.The pardon is only the fourth since the Second World War to be granted under the Royal Prerogative of Mercy.It was requested by Justice Secretary Chris Grayling, who described Turing as a national hero who fell foul of the law because of his sexuality.

His code breaking prowess helped the Allies outfox the Nazis, his theories laid the foundation for the computer age, and his work on artificial intelligence still informs the debate over whether machines can think.

But Alan Turing was gay, and 1950s Britain punished the mathematician's sexuality with a criminal conviction, intrusive surveillance and hormone treatment meant to extinguish his sex drive. Now, nearly half a century after the war hero's suicide, Queen Elizabeth II has finally granted Turing a pardon. "Turing was an exceptional man with a brilliant mind," Justice Secretary Chris Grayling said in a prepared statement released Tuesday.

Describing Turing's treatment as unjust, Grayling said the code breaker "deserves to be remembered and recognized for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science." The pardon has been a long time coming.

Pioneering Code-Breaker was Convicted of Homosexualitylan Turing, a pioneering code-breaker whose work helped the Allies win World War II and laid the foundations for modern computing, was Tuesday granted a royal pardon by Queen Elizabeth II for a 1952 conviction for homosexuality, 59 years after his death.Mr. Turing's pardon caps a long campaign by scientists, lawmakers and members of the public to overturn a conviction for which the mathematician was sentenced to chemical castration and barred from security work less than a decade after he helped crack Nazi...

Alan Turing, Enigma Code-Breaker and Computer Pioneer, Wins Royal Pardon.Nearly 60 years after his death, Alan Turing, the British mathematician regarded as one of the central figures in the development of the computer, received a formal pardon from Queen Elizabeth II on Monday for his conviction in 1952 on charges of homosexuality, at the time a criminal offense in Britain.

The pardon was announced by the British justice secretary, Chris Grayling, who had made the request to the queen. Mr. Grayling said in a statement that Mr. Turing, whose most remarkable achievement was helping to develop the machines and algorithms that unscrambled the supposedly impenetrable Enigma code used by the Germans in World War II, “deserves to be remembered and recognized for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science.”

Playing Turing's one time fiance Joan Clark, mathematician, linguist/cryptanalyst and a co-worker at Bletchley Park is Pirates of the Caribbean and Atonement actress Keira Knightley. Filming this week has been at Kings Cross station in London.

According to Martin Davis's (author of 'The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing') foreword, in the centenary edition of Sara Turing (Alan Turing's mother) book^ Alan M. Turing:

"Although Alan let her [Joan Clarke] know from the beginning of his homosexual "tendencies", she remained willing to continue the engagement. It was after they spent a week together on a bicycling trip in Wales, that he decided that it wouldn't work, and broke off the engagement. They were, and remained, very fond of one another..." (2012, Cambridge University Press, p. xiii).

Cumberbatch follows Ed Stoppardwho played Turing in the memorable 2011 Channel 4 docu-drama Britain's Greatest Codebreaker (Turing film: http://www.turingfilm.com/ ), and Derek Jacobi in Breaking the Code.
Expected to be released in 2014, the 60th anniversary year of Turing's untimely death in 1954, Cumberbatch's Turing movie may see the brilliant mathematician raised to the heights of the likes of Einstein; about time!

"If you are a scientist, you can pay the best and most effective tribute to the memory of Aaron Swartz by sharing PDFs of your published work on pdftribute.net via the hashtag #pdftribute on Twitter.

Researchers are now offering open-access versions of their work using this hashtag.

I also suggest to boycott the pay-walled journals of the science mafia and publish on arXiv, or one of the many excellent open access science journals like PLoS andeLife. Hit them in the wallet where it hurts; it is the only effective way to protest.

New Scientist | Hundreds of researchers have been sharing PDFs of their work on Twitter as a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the internet freedom activist who committed suicide on Friday.

Swartz was facing hacking charges from the U.S. government after accessing the network of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloading nearly 5 million articles from the digital library JSTOR.

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web, tweeted his own tribute: “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder. Hackers for right, we are one down. Parents all, we have lost a child. Let us weep.”"

Sunday, 30 December 2012

"A Bletchley Park codebreaker who has been appointed MBE in the New Year Honours said he still hopes his whole team will one day be recognised. Raymond "Jerry" Roberts, 92, receives the honour for services to the WWII decryption centre and to codebreaking. Mr Roberts, of Hampshire, was among four founder members of the Testery section tasked with breaking the German High Command's Tunny code.
The decrypts are credited with helping shorten the war by at least two years. Capt Roberts worked at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, until the end of the war then spent two years at the War Crimes Investigation Unit, before moving on to a 50-year career in marketing and research."

Picture and quote from here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-20859561

Hear Captain Roberts from his Alan Turing Year 2012 talk on Turing Education Day at Bletchley Park, 30 June 2012, on audio boo:

Picture of Turing Education Day speakers (minus Professor Kevin Warwick and Baroness Susan Greenfield who had to leave early) includes Captain Jerry Roberts (front row second left between his wife and Professor Maggie Boden OBE)

In the picture above: (left) Lord Charles Brocket, author of the bestseller Call Me Charlie (back row left to right) Professor Jack Copeland, Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing, Dr David Link, artist and media archaeologist, Iain Standen, CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust, Avi Wigderson, the Herbert Maass Professor of Mathematics at the Princeton Institute of Advanced Study, (front row left to right) Captain and Mrs Jerry Roberts, senior linguist and cryptographer at Bletchley Park during WW2, Margaret Boden OBE, research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, Huma Shah, lead scientist for the University of Reaching's Turing 100 event, Whitfield Diffie, co-inventor of public key cryptography, Martin Campbell-Kelly, Britain's leading computer historian, and John Harper, who leads the Turing Bombe rebuild project at Bletchley Park.

Tuesday, 20 November 2012

"The polygraph

Alessandro Bosetti

In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing before a test to define artificial intelligence. In this test, a person should differ by question and answer an intelligent machine of a man. WDR3.de offers the feature to download.

The "Ghost in the machine" has now learned a lot. Computers can measure human responses and simulate voices, emotions or even humor. Voice recognition devices are capable of sensing micro-vibrations in our voice. Search engines have learned to filter out irregularities in our language. Since then lie has become more difficult. We need in the future, always tell the truth? Or there is the perfect lie?

The manuscript for shipment

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan in 1973, lives in Berlin since 2000, where he worked as a radio writer, composer and sound artist. His main interest is the language. His radio play "America's Children" was honored in 2010 with the URTI Radio Grand Prix."